"Stars. Trees breathe in starlight year after year, and it goes deep into their bones. So when you cut a tree open, you smell a hundred years' worth of light. Ancient starlight that took millions of years to reach earth. That's why trees smell so beautiful and old."

--

Source : Frances O'Roark Dowell (2013). “Where I'd Like To Be”, p.35, Simon and Schuster

Frances O'Roark Dowell

#Beautiful Quotes #Stars Quotes #Cutting Quotes

“We can now say with considerable confidence that the Bible is not a history of anyone's past.... The Bible's "Israel" is a literary fiction... Not only have Adam and Eve and the flood story passed over to mythology, but we can no longer talk about a time of the patriarchs. There never was a "United Monarchy" in history and it is meaningless to speak of pre-exilic prophets and their writings... The Bible deals with the origin traditions of a people who never existed as such”
“I've gotten letters, but mostly from Bible-belt types who say, you must be Satan! They come right out and call me Satan and hope that I'm damned to hell.”
“Gone were my girlish ideas about romantic love and my later ideas about sexual love. From Yi, I learned to appreciate deep-heart love. Peony in Love”
“Religion is still useful among the herd - that it helps their orderly conduct as nothing else could. The crude human animal is in-eradicably superstitious, and there is every biological reason why they should be. Take away his Christian god and saints, and he will worship something else...”
“Sometimes I think heâ€™s the kind of friend that grownups call a â€˜fair-weather friend.â€™ That means when everythingâ€™s going smoothly, heâ€™s the best friend a guy could want. But as soon as something goes wrongâ€¦(he) sort of turns on you.”
“Our separation from each other is an optical illusion.”
“The blues are like the fugue in 18th century. It's probably the music that belongs most to our time.”
“Karma is not something pessimistic. If you think of karma as something wrong, you are seeing karma only according to what happened in the past. You look at the past and karma becomes a monster. So you should also look at karma in the present and future. Then karma becomes something very wide and really alive. Through karma you can understand what your destiny is. Destiny itself has no solid form; it's something you can create. You can create your life. That is why we study karma.”

Source : Dainin Katagiri (2008). “Each Moment Is the Universe: Zen and the Way of Being Time”, p.174, Shambhala Publications

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